Volksoper Berlin
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Volksoper Berlin
The Theater des Westens (Theatre of the West) is one of the most famous theatres for Musical theatre, musicals and operettas in Berlin, Germany, located at 10–12 in Charlottenburg. It was founded in 1895 for plays. The present house was opened in 1896 and dedicated to opera and operetta. Enrico Caruso made his debut in Berlin here, and the Ballets Russes appeared with Anna Pavlova. In the 1930s it was run as the Volkstheater Berlin. After World War II it served as the temporary opera house of Berlin, the Städtische Oper (Municipal Opera). In 1961 it became the first theatre in Germany to show musicals. Since then it has become the "German equivalent of Broadway extravaganzas", putting on plays and musical comedies. History The theatre was founded in 1895. The construction of the present building began in 1896, designed by Bernhard Sehring. It was opened on 1 October 1896 with a fairy tale, Holger Drachmann's ''Tausendundeine Nacht''. From 1898 the house was used for opera, fro ...
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Charlottenburg
Charlottenburg () is a locality of Berlin within the borough of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. Established as a town in 1705 and named after Sophia Charlotte of Hanover, Queen consort of Prussia, it is best known for Charlottenburg Palace, the largest surviving royal palace in Berlin, and the adjacent museums. Charlottenburg was an independent city to the west of Berlin until 1920 when it was incorporated into "Groß-Berlin" (Greater Berlin) and transformed into a borough. In the course of Berlin's 2001 administrative reform it was merged with the former borough of Wilmersdorf becoming a part of a new borough called Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. Later, in 2004, the new borough's districts were rearranged, dividing the former borough of Charlottenburg into the localities of Charlottenburg proper, Westend and Charlottenburg-Nord. Geography Charlottenburg is located in Berlin's inner city, west of the Großer Tiergarten park. Its historic core, the former village green of Alt L ...
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Mikhail Fokine
Michael Fokine, ''Mikhail Mikhaylovich Fokin'', group=lower-alpha ( – 22 August 1942) was a groundbreaking Imperial Russian choreographer and dancer. Career Early years Fokine was born in Saint Petersburg to a prosperous merchant and at the age of 9 was accepted into the Saint Petersburg Imperial Ballet School. That same year, he made his performing debut in ''The Talisman'' under the direction of Marius Petipa. In 1898, on his 18th birthday, he debuted on the stage of the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in '' Paquita'', with the Imperial Russian Ballet. In addition to being a talented dancer, Fokine was also passionate about painting and displayed talent in this area as well. He also played musical instruments, including mandolin (played on stage in ensemble led by Ginislao Paris), domra, and balalaika (played in Vasily Andreyev's Great Russian Orchestra). Transition to choreographer He became frustrated with the life of a dancer and began considering other paths, incl ...
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Erich Mühsam
Erich Mühsam (6 April 1878 – 10 July 1934) was a German-Jewish antimilitarist anarchist essayist, poet and playwright. He emerged at the end of World War I as one of the leading agitators for a federated Bavarian Soviet Republic, for which he served 5 years in prison. Also a cabaret performer, he achieved international prominence during the years of the Weimar Republic for works which, before Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, condemned Nazism and satirized the future dictator. Mühsam was tortured and murdered in the Oranienburg concentration camp in 1934. Biography Early life: 1878–1900 The third child born to Siegfried Seligmann Mühsam, a middle-class Jewish pharmacist, Erich Mühsam was born in Berlin on 6 April 1878. Soon after, the family moved to the city of Lübeck. Mühsam was educated at the Katharineum- Gymnasium in Lübeck, a school known for its authoritarian discipline and corporal punishment, which served as the model for several of the settings in ...
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Bertolt Brecht
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote '' The Threepenny Opera'' with Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic ''Lehrstücke'' and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theatre") and the . During the Nazi Germany period, Brecht fled his home country, first to Scandinavia, and during World War II to the United States, where he was surveilled by the FBI. After the war he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Returning to East Berlin after the war, he established the theatre company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and long-time col ...
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Curt Bois
Curt Bois (born Kurt Boas; April 5, 1901 – December 25, 1991) was a German actor with a career spanning over 80 years. He is best remembered for his performances as the pickpocket in ''Casablanca'' (1942) and the poet Homer in ''Wings of Desire'' (1987). Life and career Bois was born to a German Jewish family in Berlin and began acting in 1907, becoming one of the film world's first child actors, with a role in the silent movie ''Bauernhaus und Grafenschloß''. In 1909, he played the title role in ''Der Kleine Detektiv'' ('The Little Detective'). Bois performed in theatre, cabaret, musicals, silent films, and "talkies" over his long acting career. He performed under Max Reinhardt and found success in 1928 in a Viennese stage production of " Charley's Aunt" at the Josefstadt Theater. He was a successful character comic, and for a while film studios tried to make him into a "German Harold Lloyd". In 1934, institutionalized Anti-Semitism forced the Jewish Bois to leave his ho ...
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Marlene Dietrich
Marie Magdalene "Marlene" DietrichBorn as Maria Magdalena, not Marie Magdalene, according to Dietrich's biography by her daughter, Maria Riva ; however Dietrich's biography by Charlotte Chandler cites "Marie Magdalene" as her birth name . (, ; 27 December 1901 – 6 May 1992) was a German and American actress and singer whose career spanned from the 1910s to the 1980s. In 1920s Berlin, Dietrich performed on the stage and in silent films. Her performance as Lola-Lola in Josef von Sternberg's ''The Blue Angel'' (1930) brought her international acclaim and a contract with Paramount Pictures. She starred in many Hollywood films, including six iconic roles directed by Sternberg: ''Morocco'' (1930) (her only Academy Award nomination), ''Dishonored'' (1931), '' Shanghai Express'' and ''Blonde Venus'' (both 1932), ''The Scarlet Empress'' (1934) and '' The Devil Is a Woman'' (1935), '' Desire'' (1936) and ''Destry Rides Again'' (1939). She successfully traded on her glamorous persona ...
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Friedrich Hollaender
Friedrich Hollaender (in exile also Frederick Hollander; 18 October 189618 January 1976) was a German film composer and author. Life and career He was born in London to a Jewish family, where his father, operetta composer Victor Hollaender, worked as a musical director at the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Young Hollaender had a solid music and theatre family background: his uncle Gustav was director of the Stern Conservatory in Berlin, and his uncle Felix Hollaender was a well-known novelist and drama critic, who later worked with Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater. In 1899 Hollaender's family returned to Berlin. His father began teaching at the Stern Conservatory, where his son became a student in Engelbert Humperdinck's master class. In the evening he played the piano at silent film performances in local cinemas, developing the art of musical improvisation. By the age of 18 he was employed as a répétiteur at the New German Theatre in Prague and also was put in charge o ...
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Trude Hesterberg
Trude Hesterberg (2 May 1892 – 31 August 1967) was a German film actress. She appeared in 89 films between 1917 and 1964. Selected filmography * ''The Rosentopf Case'' (1918) * '' The Story of a Maid'' (1921) * ''Fridericus Rex'' (1922) * '' The Woman with That Certain Something'' (1925) * '' Upstairs and Downstairs'' (1925) * ''Circus Romanelli'' (1926) * '' Maytime'' (1926) * '' White Slave Traffic'' (1926) * '' Madame Wants No Children'' (1926) * ''The Queen Was in the Parlour'' (1927) * '' The Vice of Humanity'' (1927) * ''The Lorelei'' (1927) * '' The Imaginary Baron'' (1927) * ''Two Under the Stars'' (1927) * ''Two Red Roses'' (1928) * ''Honeymoon'' (1928) * ''Strauss Is Playing Today'' (1928) * '' When the Mother and the Daughter'' (1928) * ''The Great Adventuress'' (1928) * ''The Little Slave'' (1928) * '' Revolt in the Batchelor's House'' (1929) * ''The Convict from Istanbul'' (1929) * ''Poor as a Church Mouse'' (1931) * '' The Night of Decision'' (1931) * ''Stor ...
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Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker (born Freda Josephine McDonald; naturalised French Joséphine Baker; 3 June 1906 – 12 April 1975) was an American-born French dancer, singer and actress. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in her adopted France. She was the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 silent film '' Siren of the Tropics'', directed by and . During her early career, Baker was among the most celebrated performers to headline the revues of the in Paris. Her performance in the revue in 1927 caused a sensation in the city. Her costume, consisting of only a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace, became an iconic image and a symbol both of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties. Baker was celebrated by artists and intellectuals of the era, who variously dubbed her the "Black Venus", the "Black Pearl", the "Bronze Venus", and the "Creole Goddess". Born in St. Louis, Missouri, she renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a Fren ...
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Max Adalbert
Max Adalbert (born Johannes Adolph Krampf; 19 February 1874 – 7 September 1933) was a German stage and film actor. Biography Adalbert was born in Danzig (Gdansk), Imperial Germany as ''Maximilian Adalbert Krampf'' to a Prussian Officer. He used his first names as his stage name from the start of his career and debuted at the age of 19 at the theater of Lübeck and in 1894 at the municipal theater of Barmen. Adalbert also appeared in St.Gallen, Nuremberg and Vienna. He moved to Berlin in 1899 to work at the ''Residenztheater''. Coming in contact with Curt Bois, Adalbert turned into a comedian and co-founded the popular ''Kabarett der Komiker'' in December 1924. On 30 May 1931 he made his debut as the central character of Carl Zuckmayer's Der Hauptmann von Köpenick at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, which was filmed in the same year. Max Adalbert died of pneumonia while in Munich for a guest performance, and was buried at the celebrities cemetery ''Südwestkirchhof'' at ...
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Fritzi Massary
Fritzi Massary (31 March 1882 – 30 January 1969) was an Austrian-American soprano singer and actress. Early life and career Fritzi Massary was born Friederike Massaryk in Vienna in the Austro-Hungarian Empire on 31 March 1882. She was one of the leading operetta singers in Berlin and Vienna. During World War I, she performed for the soldiers of the Imperial German Army in theatres in occupied Belgium.'Das Koniglich Preussische Reserve Infanterie Regiment Nr.15', Major von Forstner (Published 1929), P.272. In 1920, she worked with the composer Oscar Straus, and performed in several of his operas, including ''Der letzte Walzer'' Emigration to England and America Massary was of Jewish familial extraction, and had converted to the Protestant religion in 1903. In late 1932 she departed Germany due to the rising persecution of the Jewish population by the Nazis, shortly before they seized dictatorial power in a paramilitary revolution and declared the Third Reich. Travelin ...
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Old Heidelberg (play)
''Old Heidelberg'' () is a German romantic play by Wilhelm Meyer-Förster first performed in 1901. While studying at the Heidelberg University, Prince Karl from Saxony falls in love with Käthie, an innkeeper's daughter, but has to give her up when his father dies, and he is called to return to his homeland and rule as King. The play was based on Meyer-Förster's own 1898 novel '' Karl Heinrich''. The play's title alludes to a poem by Joseph Victor von Scheffel. The work was a major international success and became one of the most performed plays in Germany during the first half of the 20th century. Adaptations Film Owing to the story's popularity it has been turned into films on numerous occasions, including the American silent film '' Old Heidelberg'' (1915), the German silent film '' Old Heidelberg'' (1923), Ernst Lubitsch's '' The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg'' (1926), and Ernst Marischka's '' Old Heidelberg'' (1959). Operetta In 1924 the play provided the basis for ...
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